DOCBOOK: Re: table entry formatting

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ David Penton <dpenton@arrowsash.com> was heard to say:
| ----- Original Message -----
| From: "Norman Walsh" <ndw@nwalsh.com>
| To: "David Penton" <dpenton@arrowsash.com>
| Cc: <docbook@lists.oasis-open.org>
| Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2001 8:24 PM
| Subject: Re: table entry formatting
| 
| > Can you give some specific examples of the sort of control you'd like
| > to have?
| 
| Well, I was thinking of something like the CELLPADDING attribute in html
| tables.  Those who have been creating tables in our data in the past (using

CALS doesn't provide any handles to control what HTML calls
cellspacing or cellpadding. Basically, you can turn the column and row
separators on and off and that's about it.

The top-level tabstyle attribute allows you to identify a style for a
whole table.

| Maybe what I am really asking is generally what the presentation strategy is
| for CALS tables, since tables seem to be inherently more oriented to
| presentation than other xml "semantic" markup.  (Or not, in which case I'm
| wrong.)

No, you're right. The strategy, to the extent that there is one, is to setup
table styles (with tabstyle) and use that to guide presentation. More often,
however, the same style is used for all tables.

| Is it that stylesheets that handle CALS have built-in assumptions
| about things not specifiable in CALS markup? 

Yes. And some stylesheets have knobs you can turn globally. For
example, you can change $table.border.padding in the XSL FO
stylesheets to change the padding of table cells.

| I seem to recall that Epic
| resorts to PI's for some table presentation issues.

Yes, it does.

| Perhaps if I actually
| looked in your modular stylesheets I would catch on to the strategy.  Do you
| think that would help?  Or am I just hopelessly muddled about tables?

It might help. If you can summarize some of the requirements that your authors
have, that might help too. But that should probably go on docbook-apps.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | To think is not enough; you must
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | think of something.--Jules Renard
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |